Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.02.2012, Blaðsíða 17

Launching Tectonics
March gets a new modern music
festival
This March, Ilan Volkov is launching
a new modern music festival that cor-
responds with John Cage’s centennial
anniversary. In addition to being an
annual event on Reykjavík’s cultural
calendar, he will also bring the festi-
val to a new location starting next year
with Glasgow with the BBC Symphony
Orchestra. Read on for some highlights
of this exciting programme of fifteen
concerts and events involving featuring
more than 150 musicians, composers
and amateurs…
Ilan tells me he has spent a lot of
timing researching John Cage, and
there will be a day in the festival dedi-
cated to his work. “Two pieces are really
interesting that day. One is 'Fifty-eight',
which is a piece for a big wind brass
band, and we are having young musi-
cians from Iceland play that. It will be
the big opening performance of the
festival in the foyer area of Harpa on
Thursday. It’s an un-conducted piece
so everybody will be taking a lot of re-
sponsibility for the performance. The
players will really be making compos-
ing decisions as performers. So it will
be nice to get a different kind of energy
and audience.”
The selections of John Cage pieces
range the gamut from his early to late
works. John Tilbury will be performing
one of his really early pieces—a piano
concerto—which Ilan says involves
hours of preparing the piano to sound
like a huge percussion instrument,
with every note being specifically mod-
ified with different materials—some-
times rubber, sometimes coins. From
his later works, the orchestra will per-
form a selection of time bracket pieces,
which Ilan explains, have almost no
score. “The musicians basically have to
decide for themselves when to come in,
and when to stop. Sometimes they have
to decide the volume, and only the pitch
is notated.”
Other Cage performances not to
miss include ‘Improvisation III,’ which
is a piece for cassettes that will be per-
formed by musicians including Reptili-
cus, Slowblow and Stilluppsteypa, and
‘Music for Piano with Amplified Sono-
rous Vessels’ which involves sound am-
plifying vibrating vases in the hall.
There will also be a full day de-
voted to the Icelandic composer Mag-
nús Blöndal. A pioneer in modernism
during the Icelandic ‘50s and ‘60s,
you could call him Iceland’s John Cage
equivalent. “I decided in advance to fo-
cus on Magnús Blöndal’s music,” Ilan
tells me. “People know it, but they never
really hear it in a serious context.” Af-
ter the orchestra performs a few of his
pieces, local musicians—Ríkharður
Friðriksson, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Kira
Kira, and Auxpan—will pay homage to
Magnús’ electronic music.
Finally, there will be a couple of
world premieres over the weekend. One
of them is a piece composed by Frank
Denyer, especially written for Eldborg
Hall. “We tried all kinds of acoustic
things; he asked me to whistle and sing
while he sat in the hall,” Ilan says. “It’s
like doing something that fits the place
and the orchestra, not just another kind
of tick on something. It’s far more per-
sonal and you feel that right away.”
And Ilan himself will be debuting
his collaboration with Oren Ambarchi,
a piece for electric guitar and orchestra.
“We are thinking about doing some-
thing with very little actually written. I
will be using gestures to react with the
orchestra to what he’s playing on the
electric guitar. It’s kind of a new way of
trying to do something,” he says, also
admitting that he “has no clue how it
will work yet.”
The festival takes place March 1 – 3
at Harpa. Tickets available at midi.is
Icelanders are free-thinking
He has yet to reach this stage with the
Iceland Symphony Orchestra, but he is
optimistic. In fact he accepted the posi-
tion at Iceland Symphony Orchestra be-
cause he was keen on being somewhere
he could develop his ideas more freely.
“There is no big tradition here hang-
ing over me and telling me I can’t do
something,” he says. “When you are in
the first few seasons in a new hall, there
is a lot of freedom as nothing is set in
stone. For me that was part of the ap-
peal and the fact that the culture here
is open and interested in new things.
People don’t think, ‘oh that’s a modern
piece, I’m not interested in it.’”
I ask him if Icelanders are more
freethinking than others and he con-
tinues to elaborate on his impressions
of the country. “There is a willingness
to do things, which I find refreshing,”
he says. “When I worked at the BBC
Scottish, I initially faced a lot of ‘No,
we can’t do that.’ There’s a lot of that
in the orchestra world, there’s a lot of
wanting to work 9-5. They know what’s
good; they don’t need to be told, to learn
something new.”
So far, Ilan says that the Iceland
Symphony Orchestra has been recep-
tive to the challenges he throws at them.
For instance, he has had them rehearse
a complicated piece by composer Bene-
dikt Mason, in which each musician
has four music stands and they have
to turn in circles on an office chair to
play different parts. “It was written for
an ensemble rather than an orchestra,
and it requires a lot of movement,” he
says. “Even though people didn’t know
what to expect, and didn’t understand
a lot of it because it’s very tricky, there
was a willingness. The attitude that I
have felt is great; people are curious and
they don’t have a negative impulse. This
means that I can ask them to do things
that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”
Yet, everything is very new and Ilan
says they are still learning about each
other, noting that there are a lot of other
changes to get used to given the orches-
tra’s new home in Harpa, Iceland’s new
concert hall and conference hall, which
opened last year.
Moving to Harpa
Before last year when Harpa opened,
both the Iceland Symphony Orches-
tra and Icelandic Opera resided in
Háskólabíó, which is also a movie the-
atre. I recall going to see an opera and
being distracted by the smell of popcorn
that came seeping through the vents in
the middle of the performance. Not to
mention, the listening experience has
been greatly enhanced.
“Yes, I think the audience is amazed
to be in a place where acoustically you
really hear things. This a big change,
and it makes the orchestra play much
better,” he says. “It’s also great that the
audience has come. At first the orches-
tra didn’t know how many concerts to
put on; it was really only at the end of
last year that we could tell that it would
be really full.” Now he says the goal is to
keep the audience coming. “We need to
keep the audience interested in what we
are doing, not only the nice location.”
Ilan points out that the orchestra is
also now very much at the forefront of
the city, a more prominent part of the
cultural life. “There is now an opportu-
nity to attract a larger audience and to
organise more concerts and education
programmes,” he says. “There is poten-
tial to go on a journey of discovery in a
place like this where there is little tradi-
tion, an open audience, and a fantastic
music hall.”
A new philosophy
I mention that I get the sense that he
is being marketed like a rock star con-
ductor, and ask whether classical music
needs a facelift, so to speak, to attract a
wider audience. While he doesn’t neces-
sarily see it that way, he definitely has
plans to breathe life into the orchestra.
“There is a tendency for people to
think it is necessary to have famous in-
ternational guests, but often a real con-
nection with the audience is established
closer to home,” he says. “In the first
year that I’m here, I want very much to
collaborate with the young talent that
grows here. I also want to develop rela-
tionships with artists, non-musicians
that would collaborate on a more regu-
lar basis. I want to expand the view of
what the concert is, which does not have
to be just one thing.”
Despite the fact that Ilan says people
have increasingly short attention spans
in an age of instant gratification, he is
optimistic that he can reach a wider au-
dience. “I think there are ways of get-
ting around this by offering a diverse
repertoire of material and working with
different kinds of artists and music,” he
says. “That’s why in the Tectonics festi-
val we are doing so many collaborations
with people who would otherwise never
work with an orchestra. It creates a
completely new dynamic where things
are unexpected. That’s an important
part of what music is and what orches-
tra life is—that’s the way it should be
anyways.”
Ilan says he is pleased that his ideas
have been received so well. “I can keep
a very traditional orchestra with reper-
toire and conductors on one hand, while
developing a whole new strand of con-
certs on the other, which will gradually
mean a different kind of audience too.
Variety is important to me; I hate when
I open orchestra brochures and they are
almost always the same whether you
are in France, England, or America.”
The brochure for Tectonics—the
new modern music festival that he is
launching in March—will certainly not
be your standard orchestra fare. It will
feature a wealth of John Cage and col-
laborative pieces with local musicians
from a variety of scenes, including elec-
tronic, improvisation, and noise.
Oh Jesus, modernism
Now, I take the opportunity to ask Ilan
to explain modernism, which is at the
forefront of the new festival. “Oh Jesus,
I would say, beginning in the twenti-
eth century, people—like Duchamp,
like Cage, like Dada artists—started to
look at things and ask totally different
questions. And this resulted in a whole
bunch of different strands within new
music and modern art,” he says. “Take
for example an old piece by Cage that
takes a piano and decides that it is going
to be something else. It is still played as
a piano, but he completely turns upside
down what the player is doing, what the
composer doing, and what the listener
expects when they look at the instru-
ment.”
And the conversation turns to John
Cage, a real pioneer in modernism. “I
think what’s really fascinating about
him is that he decided very early on to
constraints on his own power to get
more out of his music. He was a com-
poser trying to take himself out of the
composition process, with less and less
control of the outcomes, but the funny
thing is that it always sounds like Cage,
even if there is almost nothing there,
you still know it’s Cage,” he says.
“It’s kind of a whole way of think-
ing, not only about music, but also
about the world. It’s very philosophi-
cal. From the beginning, he has been
understood more by artists than musi-
cians, and he has been more respected
in the art world than the music world.
Fewer musicians know his music than
artists, who learn about it in art classes.
In that sense, he was really a new fig-
ure in the world of music and he is still
incredibly inf luential. In many ways a
lot of his work is a kind of critique of
the powerful structures and he was able
to take the rug away from underneath
by showing things from a different per-
spective. It’s difficult to explain, but for
me, that’s most interesting.”
Breaking boundaries
One of John Cage’s concepts centred on
relinquishing control and in a number
of his pieces he has removed the con-
ductor from the equation completely.
As a conductor, I ask Ilan how he feels
about this. “Well I’ve done a lot of his
pieces,” he says. “In one of them, ‘Con-
cert for piano,’ the conductor part was
a clock. I just stood there and did the
clock with my hands, sometimes mov-
ing the second hands at the right time,
but sometimes speeding up or slow-
ing down. It’s a game, like everything
he does. He’s taking rules about music
and turning them upside down. He’s of
course not interested in having a con-
ductor show off their great expression.
He is more interested in the sound be-
ing what it is.”
I take this opportunity to ask the
silly question I had been harbouring.
So you don’t have to wave a baton? Can
it be anything? Like a f lashlight? I ques-
tion. “Oh yeah.” he laughs. “I’ve done it
once in Denmark. It was very funny.
But it was kind of a disaster. They gave
me a f lashlight and it stopped working
in the show and it became completely
dark and nobody could see anything.
Yeah people do all sorts of weird stuff
now.”
I ask him if there any boundaries,
and whether there is any point that
experimentation goes too far and be-
comes ridiculous, and he points out
that people used to think Stravinsky
was too ridiculous. “Once upon a time,
‘The Rite of Spring’ was impossible.
All the orchestras in the world thought
this was an impossible piece to play.
And now, even youth orchestras play
it very well and suddenly you are sup-
posed to play bassoon very high when
it was never done in the past,” he says.
“It is part of a composer’s responsibility
to push players to a place that they have
never been before, and hopefully that is
a never-ending process. The establish-
ment’s role is always to object. But the
artists and free-thinkers need to ignore
all of this bullshit completely and try to
overcome it.”
Expect the unexpected
As for the orchestra over the next three
years, Ilan plans to continue to deliver
an exciting and diverse repertoire of
material and hopes that the audience
will grow to trust his artistic vision.
“It’s important to me that we keep what
we are doing fresh and that we continue
on this journey of experiencing new
things together with the audience,” he
says. “Ideally the audience trusts the
artistic vision of the orchestra, under-
stands it and takes risks with it, per-
haps going to a concert not knowing
very much or any of the music, because
you can trust that it will be a powerful
experience.”
Indeed, after an hour of chatting
with Ilan, I walk away trusting that we
can, at the very least, expect the unex-
pected.